If the world would only build temples to Machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect. The painter and sculptor woul...d have plenty to do, and could, in complete peace and suitably honoured, pursue their trade without further trouble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The Taylor and the Painter often contribute to the Success of a Tragedy more than the Poet. Scenes affect ordinary Minds as much a...s Speeches; and our Actors are very sensible, that a well-dressed Play has sometimes brought them as full Audiences, as a well-written one.... But however the Show and Outside of the Tragedy may work upon the Vulgar, the more understanding Part of the Audience immediately see through it, and despise it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things.... But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Our religion ... is itself profoundly sad--a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants... full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language--so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been lef...t borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant.... The act of faith consisted in believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance.... Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this--as in other ways--they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings... record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the ...painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »